Sunday, December 15, 2013

How to reduce your required sleep time to just 2 hours a day

Intelclinic presents a new project called NeuroOn. Using EEG/EOG/EMG and with a sleep mask it will be possible to switch from two different sleep states: monophasic and polyphasic. The result is a solution that offers less and better sleep.


What is polyphasic sleep?
It is a term referring to alternate sleep patterns that can reduce the required sleep time to just 2-6 hours daily. It involves breaking up your sleep into smaller parts throughout the day, which allows you to sleep less but feel as refreshed as if you slept for 8 hours or more.
Simply put, it's a series of fine-tuned power naps that allow you to sleep effectively, rest better and perform at optimum energy levels during the day.
Additionally, NeuroOn monitored polyphasic sleep allows you to sync your body clock to very demanding schedules at whatever time is convenient or required.
In conclusion, through great sleep efficiency, Polyphasic sleep can give you an extra 4 hours of free time every day. That’s up to 28 hours (1 day+) a week, 1460 hours a year.

This project will be completed in July 2014. For more information press here.


Wednesday, June 19, 2013

iPhone Mobile App that Reads your Brain Activity

MELON company from USA created a headband, very simple to use, that reads your brain activity. This device uses the electroencephalography to measure your focus level and process it to show the results in your iPhone.


Gain insight into how your mind works by tracking your focus during any activity you choose. Understand yourself. Learn differently. Imagine if you could see and understand the invisible activity of your brain. Could you transform how you work? Improve the way you meditate? Find a new way to be creative? Melon is a headband and mobile app duo that tracks and helps you improve your focus in relation to your activity, your environment, your emotions, and any other behavior you want to track.


For the developer community there are a Software Development Kit for iOS and Android apps, where it is possible to access to raw data, list of algorithms for different mental states and connect to and control other Bluetooth devices

This project is undoubtedly one step further to the future of BCI.


Thursday, June 06, 2013

BCI Technologies: BrainTech Israel 2013

Israel will host their 1st International Brain Technology Conference at October, 14-15, 2013.


This conference will be a unique and innovative event, showcasing the latest developments in the field in Israel and around the world,  and featuring top-tier speakers from the world of neurotechnology along with engaging panels and networking opportunities. The event will bring together companies, entrepreneurs, academics, investors and life science and technology multinationals to explore opportunities in brain technology and enhance collaboration.

For more information about this conference press here.

Israel invests heavily on the study of the brain and has recently created a research center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The 14,500 square-meter building include state-of-the-art labs, classrooms, an innovative imaging center and areas for biological and pre-clinical research. Significant emphasis were placed on constructing an environmentally friendly building with a focus on conserving energy and reducing carbon dioxide emissions.


Another concrete example of great investment in the study of the brain that is being done all over the world.

Monday, June 03, 2013

BCI State of the art: International BCI Meeting 2013

The Fifth International Brain-Computer Interface Meeting occurred at Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California from June 3rd - 7th, 2013. It was an International BCI Meeting organized by a committee of BCI researchers from around the world. 


Here is the list of all the individual abstracts providing the most recent BCI state of the art:




Thursday, March 07, 2013

Obama Administration Encourages the Study of Human Brain

The run to invest in the discovery of the human brain began. Now it is the U.S. with the Administration of President Barack Obama that presents their project with an investment of billions of dollars.


The New York Times, from 13 February 2013, explains in more detail the objectives of this program:

The Obama administration is planning a decade-long scientific effort to examine the workings of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of its activity, seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics. The project, which the administration has been looking to unveil as early as March, will include federal agencies, private foundations and teams of neuroscientists and nanoscientists in a concerted effort to advance the knowledge of the brain’s billions of neurons and gain greater insights into perception, actions and, ultimately, consciousness.



Thursday, February 28, 2013

Toyota Prius Concept Bike with a BCI

In the beginning of 2011 Toyota and Parlee announced the "Toyota Prius concept bike". This new bike has a large part of the materials in carbon fiber which keep it light and easy to move. "Its brakes were molded into the fork and bottom bracket to increase aerodynamics, along with countless other tweaks that were tested and validated in the wind tunnels at MIT. A built-in dock for a smartphone enables riders to view information about their speed, cadence and heart rate." There were also some more innovations but the most interesting was the use of BCI using EPOC equipment to read EEG. The next video shows Toyota's presentation.


In January 2013, after a large number of months of development, this bike was present in the Detroit Auto Show with their all innovations. All but except one: The helmet with neurotransmitters to enable the cyclist to shift gears just by thinking was not part of the presentation.


The question is: Why? Well, it is totally different to use this equipment in a testing room comparing to use outside in a bad floor. Probably the large number of artifacts created with the street vibration can produce in real-time serious problems to this system. Let's wait some more time to see if this BCI project can have the imagined success.


Tuesday, February 26, 2013

JORTEC 2013

In the last week of 18 to 23 February was held in the Faculty of Science and Technology of Lisbon - Portugal the JORTEC (TEChnological JOuRneys) 2013. The organizing commission of the biomedical’s JORTEC had some lectures and workshops very interesting during this days. 

Listing some we have:
  • "The Biomedical Engineer in the Health Industry", Engineer Ana Raquel Reis
  • "The present and future of devices for neural recording", Dr. Adam Kampff
  • "The cerebellar circuit: from synapse to behavior", Dr. Megan Carey
  • "Integrity in Science", Dr. João Lobo Antunes

More information can be obtained in the JORTEC2013 webpage.


OpenViBE 0.15.0 and Mensia Technologies

After almost 6 months with less activity the open-source OpenViBE BCI application has begun a new project and it has now the software version 0.15.0. With this upgrade, for now, it is possible the Acquisition-Server (AS) receive simulations from external applications that must run at the same computer where the AS is installed.

New features are expected as well as professional use. The french company Mensia Technologies located in Paris is an example with their core business centered in OpenViBE.
Hopefully this project will continue his development offering new features and keeping based in user-friend technology!

Wednesday, January 09, 2013

Brain Interactive Map

University of California at Berkeley did an interesting study called "Interactive map: how the brain sorts what we see". It shows how the brain is wired to put the categories of objects and actions we see daily and it organizes these groupings. 


Using fMRI they record the patients brain activity while showing 2 hours of movie trailers where each object and action of the movies were identified before. Measuring the blood flow in about 30.000 of Voxels (Volumetric Pixels), covering the entire cortex, it was possible to determine how each object and action affects those areas.
The final result was to formulate models that describe how the brain encodes visual information and responds during natural vision. 
Here it is a small video which I've made using the BrainViewer. 


If you have an old PC probably it will not be possible to use the online "BrainViewer" because some of the WebGL functions don’t exist in the video board.

For more informations about BCI/EEG press here.




Monday, January 07, 2013

OpenVibe 3D Voxel and Topographic Map

Voxel is an OpenVibe 3D plugin that shows how to display reconstructed brain activity through inverse model and voxel visualizer. It can be tested using demo file voxel-display.xml





Another scenario is the 3D topographic map that uses the interpolating potentials at the surface of the scalp, converting them to colours using a colour scale and mapping them over the surface of the scalp.


Here is an example created with raw data from EPOC. It shows in real-time 2D and 3D Topographic maps, Spectrum, Signal and Matrix Display, and also a Time-frequency map.

For more informations about BCI/EEG press here.




Biomedical Engineering Salary and Jobs

Biomedical Engineering is one of the highest offer/paid jobs in the world. The CNN Money based in PayScale.com it says that a median pay for an experienced worker in the field is around $6.500 (5.000€) / month and it can be $10.000 (7.500€) at the top career.


The sites SimplyHire and Job Search Money CNN show some of the supply jobs around the world. In the last 30 days 3.000 jobs were found in SimplyHire (an average of 100 jobs offer per day).

Sunday, January 06, 2013

The Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme

The Champalimaud Neuroscience community is a research group from over 20 different countries to try to understand how the brain works. The "Ar" group using interactive projects wants to show to the people why science is important. 

Society, Adventures in illegal art, Mind Invaders, Think of a Numb3r, Food for Thought, Human 2.0, Creativity and Suspicious Coincidences in the Brain - are some of their very active scientific events.


The Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown is located in Portugal near Belém.

Saturday, January 05, 2013

Human Brain Project

The human brain has extraordinary functions and it is the most powerful computer imaginable. The Human Brain Project wants to start building a computer model of the brain and simulate its functions. It consists of a large international number of neuroscientists, physicists and other groups from the scientific community that aims to recreate the human brain inside a supercomputer with a budget of 1 Billion Euro.
As modern computers exploit ever-higher numbers of parallel computing elements, they face a power wall: power consumption rises with the number of processors, potentially to unsustainable levels. By contrast, the brain manages billions of processing units connected via kilometers of fibres and trillions of synapses, while consuming no more power than a light bulb. Understanding how it does this can provide the key not only to a completely new category of hardware but to a paradigm shift for computing as a whole, moving away from current models of “bit precise” computing towards new techniques that exploit the stochastic behavior of simple, very fast, low-power computing devices embedded in intensely recursive architectures. 


In short, the goal of the Human Brain Project is to build an infrastructure for future neuroscience, future medicine and future computing that will catalyze a global collaborative effort to understand the human brain and its diseases and ultimately to emulate its computational capabilities. The economic and industrial impact is potentially enormous.